The Political Cost in Dole’s Mordant Wit

NEW YORK —  Say what you will about Bob Dole, he is the first genuinely funny politician we’ve had in years. With his deadpan delivery and his dry nasal basso that inflects anything he says with drollery, Dole knocks down sly asides like a billiard champion clearing the table.

Once, asked to defend President George Bush’s decision to break his promise of no new taxes, Dole said that Bush “had his back to wall.” Pressed to elaborate, Dole smirked and replied dryly, “I don’t know. But he had his back to the wall.” More recently, when Patrick J. Buchanan accused him of distorting Buchanan’s record, Dole mumbled that he was only reporting what he’d read in Buchanan’s syndicated columns, and he just always assumed they were accurate. In the same debate, commenting on Lamar Alexander’s encomiums to him as majority leader, Dole growled, “You keep saying that--but then you have little hooker in the end there.”

Dole’s darts have injected about the only amusement there has been in this presidential campaign--but far from being rewarded for it, he has been castigated. Dole is called sarcastic, sardonic, mordant and, most often, mean. People seem to think his biting wit bares too many teeth, prompting even his handlers to debate whether to “let Dole be Dole.”

Dole’s acidulous wit only underscores how humorless the Bush and Clinton years have been compared with past administrations. Franklin D. Roosevelt was a virtuoso of ridicule, raising his voice in mock indignation against his enemies. Harry S. Truman wasn’t exactly a cutup, but his imitation of political commentator H.V. Kaltenborn announcing Truman’s defeat to Thomas Dewey has passed into political lore.

President John F. Kennedy possessed an elegant wit, describing himself famously during one state visit, when his wife had become the center of attention, as “the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris,” or answering a question at a news conference about increasingly negative media coverage by paraphrasing a current cigarette ad: “I am reading more now and enjoying it less.” And Ronald Reagan, though clearly the beneficiary of professional jokesmiths, delivered some winning lines, too--like the time he quoted George Washington during a State of the Union address and then clarified, “Let me say, I did not actually hear George Washington say that.”

Most of this humor was self-deprecatory: JFK joshing about being overshadowed by Jackie or Reagan making light of his age. Dole can play that game, too, and well. Addressing the National Governors’ Assn., he observed that the governors had already sat through two days of meetings and speeches, “So I thought I might liven things up by giving my State of the Union response again”--referring to his disastrous rebuttal. He added that President Bill Clinton’s consultant, Dick Morris, had contacted him after the speech and assured him the president’s polls showed “people loved my speech, and just to keep right on giving it.”

But Dole’s “problem” is that he doesn’t restrict himself to the bland, predictable palaver of politicians. Try as he might to restrain it, he has that acerbic streak--the one he showed when he produced a Top 10 List for David Letterman on balancing the budget and suggested, “Arkansas--sell it!” or that gave rise to his immortal description of Presidents Jimmy Carter, Gerald R. Ford and Richard M. Nixon after a reunion: “See no evil, hear no evil and evil.”

The problem for Dole is that a caustic sense of humor is now a liability in American politics--a condition that has implications far beyond this campaign. If politicians have lost their funny bones, the obvious culprit for this state of affairs would seem to be political correctness. It is just too easy for a joke to go awry these days and wind up offending someone. But the demise of humor among political candidates began long before the PC police started walking their beats. It may have begun as early as a century ago, and if it has intensified over the last decade it’s not because the new imperatives of cultural pluralism demand it but rather because perceptions of the political process have changed.

In the 19th century, political campaigns were raucous affairs. Candidates would hit the stump, delivering a few hours worth of stem-winding oratory, and voters stayed the course not because they were necessarily smarter than us or had a more active sense of civic duty but because political rallies were fun. Old-time orators knew how to entertain. They knew how to stir audiences, and audiences, for their part, knew how to interject questions and comments. No orator worth his salt refused to engage a heckler in repartee--which only added to the spectacle. Nor was it just the fervid speechifying that turned political discourse into the boisterous carnival it was. There were songs and story-telling and picnicking--all making campaigns back then into the political equivalent of the Lalapalooza tour.

But if campaigns were like Lalapalooza, one main attraction was a fierce “Punch and Judy” show. Politics in the last century was hotly partisan. Voters and politicians alike understood that opponents would swack one another silly. They understood you unleased every weapon in your rhetorical arsenal--from simple name-calling to scathing derision--and the fire would be returned tenfold. This sort of bushwhacking politics wasn’t for delicate sensibilities. It was tough and mean and spiteful--and, in the process, often very, very funny.

It was funny because American humor so easily comported not only with the free-wheeling style of American campaigning but with one of 19th-century politics’ central themes: egalitarianism. Except for some incorrigible Whigs who prided themselves on their gentility, American politicians were at pains to seem ‘jes folks, down-home and plain-spoken. By the same token, 19th-century American humor was largely predicated on showing the comic naivete of ordinary Americans and puncturing the fatuous pretensions of our self-styled aristocrats. Here, derisive politics and derisive humor conjoined. A good politician was able to skewer his foes with a savage bon mot.

What made Abraham Lincoln a reigning political wit was just this skill in deploying homespun analogies to deflate opponents. Berating Stephen Douglas during their 1858 debates for repeating the same charges again and again, Lincoln compared him to “the fisherman’s wife, whose drowned husband was brought home with his body full of eels.” Asked what should be done with the deceased, she said, “Take the eels out and set him again.” Another time Lincoln derided Douglas’ support of popular sovereignty by calling it “as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death.”

Yet, the Lincoln-Douglas debates were decorous next to most political rhetoric of the day. Incivility was the rule. But the incivility was encased in a larger civility--for politics was treated much like a spectator sport. Everyone knew the scabrous things politicians said were just part of the game.

How Dole would have loved that sort of rock ‘em, sock ‘em politics and how he would have succeeded in it--drawing blood with every mordant thrust. But Dole lives in a different age. In this century, political allegiances have weakened, making independents the largest voting cohort and rendering partisanship obsolete. An objective press has replaced the advocacy of the past, putting a higher premium on consensus. And the electronic media have disengaged voters from the candidates, turning rooters into props for photo-ops on the evening news.

All this has changed the political ground rules and, with them, the function of campaign humor. Campaigns are no longer rowdy festivals where hot-blooded candidates ignite the faithful to action--at least not winning campaigns. They are cool media performances where a successful candidate must convince the electorate he is basically harmless, middle of the road and thus unthreateningly presidential. To wit, Clinton.

In this context, humorous barbs such as Dole’s aren’t appreciated because the system can’t accommodate them. In a political process where incivility isn’t regarded as a game but as bad form--and where the press is there not to stoke the fires of partisanship but rather to pull the alarm-box handle--deprecatory humor does seem mean. Knocking yourself is all right. But only someone like Reagan, whose geniality was unimpeachable, could get away with the kind of digs for which Dole now gets maligned.

Dole can plod with the best of them, so he may yet win the presidency against Clinton, a plodder with an earnest, toothless sense of humor. But if he does, it will be in spite of his sarcasm, not because of it. And for that, anyone who enjoys a good riposte is the loser.